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Tocqueville: The Life

Glimpsing the human side of major historical figures is endlessly fascinating. As Melville noted, Shakespeare in his own day wasn’t Shakespeare. He was Master William Shakespeare, the harried writer — mocked as an “upstart crow” by a critic — who churned out plays for the proprietors of the Globe Theater.

Humanizing Alexis de Tocqueville ­poses special challenges. His magnum opus, “Democracy in America,” has gained prophetic stature since its publication in two volumes (1835 and 1840). Its grand pronouncements about America roll before us in chapter after sweeping chapter, each ringing with authority. Tocqueville covered many topics — government, commerce, law, literature, religion, newspapers, customs — in elegant prose that captured the essence of democracy. His insights, while sometimes debatable, are often eerily prescient.

In “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America,” Leo Damrosch, the Ernest Bernbaum professor of literature at Harvard, reveals the man behind the sage. Damrosch shows us that “Democracy in America” was the outcome of a nine-month tour of the United States that Tocqueville, a temperamental, randy 25-year-old French apprentice magistrate of aristocratic background, took in 1831-32 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont.

The French government commissioned the pair to report on American prisons. But Tocqueville confided that he wanted to examine “all the workings of that vast American society that everyone talks about and no one knows.”

Drawing from Tocqueville’s private writings, Damrosch presents the young traveler as insatiably curious. After landing in Newport, R.I., in May 1831, Tocqueville and Beaumont visited 17 of America’s 24 states and three of its sparsely settled territories. Writing down their impressions of the many Americans they met, including notables like John Quincy Adams and Sam Houston, they accumulated a huge store of information.

Along the way, they fulfilled their original mission of exploring America’s penitentiaries. The two main kinds of prisons they analyzed — one introduced in Auburn, N. Y., the other in Philadelphia — had special rigors. In the Auburn plan, which was employed at Sing Sing penitentiary, prisoners worked together for 11 hours a day but were not allowed to speak to or look at one another. “It felt like walking through the catacombs,” Tocqueville wrote. “There were a thousand living beings there and yet it was a solitude.” Whips were always ready for the recalcitrant. The Philadelphia system offered an even harsher discipline: perpetual solitary confinement. Every prisoner inhabited a thick-walled cell and had no contact with anyone but a chaplain who visited occasionally. Tocque­ville called this punishment “at once the mildest and the most terrible ever invented” — a comment substantiated by reports of the many prisoners who lost their minds or committed suicide.

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From Bettmann/Corbis

The prison tour was secondary to Tocque­ville’s purpose of exploring American life in all its dimensions. Every place Tocqueville went, north and south, yielded valuable insights that found their way into his book. His visits to cities made it clear to him that Americans “value everything on earth in response to this sole question: How much money will it bring in?” He found that Americans were a restless, practical people, hungry for novelty and change yet committed to working hard to get ahead. With its energetic population and abundant resources, Tocqueville wrote, America “will someday become one of the richest and most powerful countries on earth.” His excursions into the frontier and the Deep South exposed him to Indian culture, which he regarded sympathetically, and to slavery, which he accurately predicted would produce “the most horrible of all civil wars.”

While Damrosch’s book doesn’t come close to identifying real-life sources for all of Tocqueville’s arguments — no book of such concision could do that — it usefully connects specific themes to certain Ameri­can locales. Cincinnati, for instance, was a particularly rich trove of information. A rapidly expanding city of 25,000, it struck Tocqueville as a place of “absolute social equality,” without social hierarchies. But it enforced what he called “very severe laws against the blacks” and thus exemplified the racism then rampant in America.

The contradictions Tocqueville found in Cincinnati fed into his larger conclusions. America, he found, was a nation of paradoxes. It proclaimed that all men were created equal, yet was suffused by racial prejudice. It placed unparalleled faith in the individual yet was conformist and controlled by the majority. It was materialistic yet deeply religious, commercial but puritanical. It had a carefully conceived Constitution and a well-defined political system, yet its most important decisions sprang from public opinion and mores, not the government.

Damrosch is an acute observer of Tocque­ville, whose generalizations, he notes, don’t always stand up to scrutiny. Although Tocqueville was right about the importance of America’s middle class, he minimized widening divisions between the rich and the poor. Tocqueville took an overly harsh view of Andrew Jackson, dismissing him as “a man of violent temperament and mediocre abilities,” ignoring his charisma and his political abilities. An agnostic raised as a Catholic, Tocqueville exaggerated the oddness of evangelical religion, misreading its social meaning for Americans.

Still, as Damrosch suggests, Tocque­ville’s responses to America were more perceptive and appreciative than those of other European travelers, like Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens. These visitors made pungent, informational comments about America but showed a provincialism that Tocqueville rose above. The fastidious Trollope portrayed America as a nation of boorish tobacco-chewers, bellowing revivalists and swaggerers. Dickens complained about the grunting pigs and screaming newsboys on the streets of Manhattan. For Tocqueville, such excesses were part of the liveliness and brashness of an ever-changing democratic society.

Returning to France in March 1832 full of enthusiasm for the American system, Tocqueville set himself to writing his two large volumes. He told a friend, “I’ve hurled myself at America in a sort of fury. . . . I think about hardly anything else.” The books made him famous, and he rose in the French government, which he hoped to help redesign. He said in a speech that he had seen in America that democracy could be “living, active and triumphant,” and he urged his nation to follow America’s example. For a brief period after the democratic revolutions of 1848, it seemed that France would heed his advice. But when Louis-Napoleon dissolved the National Assembly and announced himself Emperor Napoleon III in 1852, Tocqueville’s democratic dreams were dashed and his political career was over.

He was beset by personal problems. His wife grew frantic over his affairs. Having told her that he had “vast desires” and “passions that lead me astray,” he was, in Damrosch’s words, “regularly (not to say compulsively) unfaithful.” Subject to mood swings, he became increasingly depressed about his nation, which he compared to a man traveling on a moonless, foggy December night. He bitterly recalled the youthful ardor that had driven the writing of “Democracy in America,” which he no longer even looked at except to make corrections for reprints. When he died of tuberculosis at 53 in 1859, he could not know that his penetrating observations on America would stand as timeless statements about democratic society.

TOCQUEVILLE’S DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

By Leo Damrosch

Illustrated. 277 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27

David S. Reynolds is the author, most recently, of “Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.” He is at work on a book on Harriet Beecher Stowe.

A version of this review appears in print on April 18, 2010, on page BR19 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Tocqueville: The Life. Today's Paper|Subscribe